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OpenSocial and the Enterprise Intranet

Attended a Jive do for UK users last week and put some faces to names and met up with some of my peers in the UK. We were given some great presentations by Jive’s Bill Lynch, Bob Brown and Nils Heuer (the latter responding to a cheeky tweet I made about the venue, a subterranean London club).

Whilst not going into any detail here, I was encouraged by the content as it confirmed some of my thoughts over a widget driven intranet, the role of the Cloud and the impact HTML5 will have on our future intranets. I could also see a new landscape of competition emerging in the future with social software vendors and more traditional Content Management System (CMS) vendors.

There was one thing I hadn’t thought about though, and that is OpenSocial. This is (or something similar) is essential for all that I’ve been thinking about to work. At heart is the factor of interoperabilty in new social intranets, something that Atlassian’s Jay Simons sees at one of the 5 determining factors of OpenSocial’s importance. What this means is that widgets or other discreet components can work together easily and seamlessly, so long that is that they all use the same system.

The big one that doesn’t of course is Facebook’s and I need to understand more the limits this might put on the interconnectedness of intranety technology. But then, who is using Facebook’s connectivity for enterprise social software?

If the same question is put of OpenSocial then the answer is legion – Jive, OpenText, Google (who made the thang of course and Cisco. And Cisco of course like interoperability – the router is the essence of interoperability and in the fight with Apple of who owned the right to use the work iPhone a key concession wrung from Apple by Cisco was on interoperability.

On doing my research on this, I was pleased to come across this slide deck by Kit Sharma. I’ve worked with Kit on intranet stuff so it brought a big smile on my face to see his work here.

Refs

Five reasons OpenSocial will change the Enterprise Jay Simons, Atlassian
Enterprise OpenSocial – A Year of Progress Adina Levin, OpenText

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